Status Update

2011

In the series Status Update, I am once again relegating a digital technology back to the material world, this time to explore what happens to an individual's online identity and memory of it at the moment he/she stops recording Facebook status updates. This time-based piece plays on the common assumption that various social media produce an unrelenting wave of information and challenges the viewer to consider what happens when the wave stops. Frequency becomes more important than content when establishing online relationships. At the same time, by recording everything, we are giving ourselves permission to forget or ignore. When the piece begins, a series of separate machines hang on the wall above piles of receipt paper on the floor. Each machine and corresponding roll represent all the Facebook status updates of one Facebook user from the day he or she signed up for the service to the day that he or she hypothetically stopped using the service.

Over time, the receipt paper rolls up neatly into the identical machines until the piles on the floor have become condensed rolls of paper representing the quantity of each subject's online Facebook presence.